I became really interested in boardgame design in the early eighties. In these times, we had a handful of games and didn’t know much, if anything, about their designers. There were very only a handful of names. David Parlett, the designer of Hare and Tortoise, was British. The other ones, Sid Sackson, Peter Olotka and the Future Pastimes team, were Americans. We vaguely knew something was beginning in Germany, but no names were famous yet. The polyglott and Cosmopolitan Alex Randolph was the most fascinating character. We knew that a after a golden childhood in very expensive swiss boarding schools, this scion of a rich American family, whose parents were ambassadors, had studied philosophy, had worked as a secret agent, had brought a cute card game, Raj, from India, had lived in Japan and become a first rate Shogi player, and then had settled in Venice where, with friends Leo Colovini and Dario de Toffoli, he had designed Inkognito, a secret agent game during the carnival of Venice. Alex Randolph was a character just out of a European novel, and I deeply regret having never met him.

Alex Randolph playing Shogi

Most of Alex Randolph’s designs are abstract, if not mathy. Twixt and Ricochet Robots are often said to be his masterworks, but I’ve never been much fond of them, too cold for me. I have played much more games of Inkognito, Intrigues à Venise in French, a deduction game in which one must first find out one’s partner before discreetly communicating with him about our common mission. Gorgeously edited, it revisits Clue with humor and subtleness. This game showed me that there was something more to do with Clue, and probably motivated me to design Mystery of the Abbey. There are many other Alex Randolph designs I played a lot and still occasionally play. Raj / Hol’s der Geier is inspired by a traditional indian game about which I’d like to know more. Ghosts is a deceptively simple tactical and bluffing game. Camel Go is one of the most original racing games. Big Shot, which just got republished by my Korean friend at Mandoo Games, is a gem of an auction game

Alex Randolph in Venice, with a copy of Veleno

In the late eighties, I incidentally played a lesser know Randolph design, Veleno, an abstract with very simple mechanisms. Each player on turn moves a common pawn on a board, capturing a token on a neighboring space. Those who follow my creations know that, while I am wary of cooperation games, I have always been interested in games with a single pawn moved by allplayers, and idea I have already used in Silk Road or Isla Dorada. The other fascinating aspect of Veleno is its pervert three and four players scoring system, in which each player adds their left neighbor’s score. This clever rule gave its name to the German edition of the game, Gute Nachbarn – the nice neighbor. In Veleno, you have a good neighbor on your left, a bad one on your right, and you’re the good neighbor of your bad neighbor.

For years, I had this game in my thoughts. The simple and elegant system was fascinating, the actual game play a bit lacking. The small playing board and the unbalanced values of the colored tokens often made for scripted games, in which movements were obvious and the winner determined in two or three turns. Then two years ago, on a whim, i dig up my old copy of Veleno and started to think of this game as I would like it, with a bigger board, more variety in the tokens and the scoring, and more interaction between players. I soon named my game Tonari, meaning neighbor in Japanese, because it sounded nice for an abstract, because Alex Randolph had had a japanese life, because it reminded of the German name, Gute Nachbarn, and the central idea of the game, and because at that time I was trying, with little success, to learn some Japanese.

A near final prototype of Tonari

Like a novel or a piece of music, a boardgame never comes out of nowhere, is never entirely new and original, and it’s for the best. All my designs have been more or less influenced by other games, games I had liked or disliked, and an attempt to generate similar or dissimilar experiences. The truth is nevertheless that some games are more original than other ones, and Tonari belongs to the least innovative ones. It is not always easy, even for a seasoned game designer like me, to trace the line between minor development of an existing system and really new game. The line is often blurred (and idea I discussed at more length here). While I was working on what will become Tonari, i was also designing a light card game inspired by another Alex Randolph’s design, Raj. This game, featuring an old lady giving breadcrumbs to pigeons, was finally published as Miaui. It is after both games were nearly finalized, when playing them with friends, that I decided the pigeon game was original enough to be considered a new creation, while Tonari was only a variation on Veleno / Gute Nachbarn, because while it added new pieces, it kept all the original elements in the game. Through his agent Smart Cookie Games, I contacted Michael Katz, Alex Randolph’s nephew and heir, who kindly accepted that I could look for a publisher for Tonari, and that if I found one, royalties will be shared half and half.

Publishers are a bit wary nowadays of publishing abstract games. I proposed Tonari unsuccessfully to several of them, and it’s finally IDW which, probably encouraged by the success of Matt Loomis & Isaac Shalev’s Seikatsu, decided to publish it. They didn’t want to go full abstract, but finding the right setting wasn’t easy. There were too many recent games about witch cauldrons, including Wolfgang Warsch’s outstanding The Quacks of Quedlinburg. They finally settled on fishing, with the common pawn being a trawler, and the tokens of different colors different varieties of fish. Placing the action in Japan even allows us to keep the name I had chosen for my prototype, Tonari. Even though it was an afterthought, the fishing theme works surprisingly well, and is well rendered by the art of Kwanchai Moriya, an artist with a very specific style with whom I had not worked before. I amparticularly fond of the cover art.

I had a very rich and busy, but also very tiring, gaming month. It started with the sixth gaming laboratory organized from February 8 to 10 in Wroclaw, Poland, by Krzysztof Szafranski and Rebel, one of the main Polish game publisher and distributor, recently taken over by Asmodee – nothing original, I know.The gaming laboratory idea is original and very efficient. Wannabe game designers are grouped in teams of five or six people as different as possible and given access to a bunch of cards, tokens, dice and other game pieces. Supervised by seasoned designers or developers, teams are given a loose theme as a kind of frame and starting point, and have two full days to design a playable boardgame. Several conferences gave some rhythm to the event. Adam Kwapinski speaks relatively slowly, which helped me follow his talk in Polish about theme and mechanism, and he was really surprised when, the next day, I quoted him in mine, in English, about writing rules.

I had already taken part in this kind of event, but always with much shorter timespan, usually three or four hours, which is not enough to design a fully playable prototype. With two full days, and several professional advisers going from table to table, most teams managed to design really good and original games. On the third day, the jury played full games of everything and voted for the best design – a game about the Babel tower. It was not my favorite, but the choice was difficult between many really interesting designs. Heiko Heller, from Heidelbär, dislikes following suit – he is leaving Asmodee. He left Woclaw with one or two prototypes which he might publish next year. Before leaving, he made play two of his upcoming games – I remember only the name of the first one, Wordsmith. Both are excellent, and both are evolutions of Runes, the zany word game published thirty years ago by Eon.

Mes prototypes prêts à partir pour CannesPrototypes ready for Cannes

Two weeks later, I was in Cannes for the festival des jeux. In ten years, thanks to Nadine Seul who is retiring this year, the Cannes game fair has become one of the world’s main boardgame event. The boardgamegeek now has a booth and broadcasts live as it does in Essen or at Gen Con, and people speak English as often as French.I had fewer new stuff than these last years.

My only really new game on the show was Lost in the Woods, co-designed with Anja Wrede, illustrated by Frédéric Pillot and published by Purple Brain (recently take over by, guess who ? Yes, Asmodee) in their cute Games and Tales line. My base camp this year was at Sweet Games, where my upcoming card game Ménestrels was demoed. This game was inspired by my friend’s Sandra Pietrini’s PhD about traveling artists in the Middle Ages, and is gorgeously illustrated by my friend David Cochard. It was very well received, and raised some curiosity from the BGG team when I pitched it to them, which might help us in finding a publisher interested in doing it in English.

A game of MinstrelsUne partie de Ménestrels

Few new games, therefore few demoes and signings and more time to meet publishers. I discussed upcoming games of mine with the Space Cowboys, with Repos prod, with Blue Orange and with Ankama, and pitched prototypes to them and a few others.The big surprise was to learn incidentally, by a third party, that Gigamic (who has just been taken over by…. no, not Asmodee this time) was to publish very soon a French version of Greedy Kingdoms, the two player bluffing game I designed with Hayato Kisaragi and which was published last year by AEG. It looks like no-one thought of informing me.

Japan was the third stage of this busy gaming month. Like last year, I went to the Osaka game market. Pressed under an impressive concrete architecture which probably looked modern forty years ago, the game market is a nice little game fair which conveys a good feel of the Japanese boardgaming scene, made of a few mid-weight publishers and dozens, if not hundreds, of very small independent publishers and self-published card games, of which the best ones are usually later taken over by big European of US publishers.

This year, there were many fun bluffing and party games. Most of them were language dependent though, making them impossible to play for a gaijin like me. Among them was Jun Sasaki’s Mr Face, at Oink games, which should soon get an English language print run. Japanese local gaming specialty is small and light card games. I was told the best one this year was Takumi Ueda’s Kobe, but unfortunately it was already sold out when I finally found the publisher’s booth. It’s a shame, since it would have been a cute souvenir, especially after having spent the day before in Kobe, the most western style, may be even “occidentalist kitsch” of Japanese cities.

I’ll try to get a copy in some other way, may be through nicegameshop. Anyway, I nevertheless bring back a dozen small card games, bought more or less at random, we’ll see if something stands out. I also took the opportunity to discuss the upcoming “Japanese style” revamping of one of my older games, but I can’t say more about it yet.

Au Japon pour trois jours, je n’avais qu’une petite valise et n’ai donc rapporté que quelques jeux, tous dans des petites boites.I was in Japan for three days only, so I brought back only a few games, and only small boxes.

I’m now writing this report in the Osaka airport… back to work at school tomorrow. May be I should take some rest.

I didn’t play much as a kid, but I remember a card game which was in my parents’ car, The Crow. It had about fifty cards which were dealt among the passengers. We than had to watch the landscape looking for the stuff on our cards – cow, tractor, church…. The first player who had played all of his cards was the winner. There are now many games of this kind, and I even have one variant somewhere on my shelves. I’ve always wondered why Travel Bingo as it is played in the US is still completely unknown in Europe.

Three or four years ago, I was preparing for a trip in the US, first to visit my friends of Fantasy Flight Games in Minneapolis, and then to gen Con. one week before leaving, I realized that since they had the Game of Thrones license, I should try designing something that could fit. I had only a few days, so it had to be something very basic, so I tried a very simple idea – a drafting version of the Crow. I only needed a deck of about sixty cards with recurring characters, events or items in the series. Players draft the cards by picking and passing before staring an episode, and the first player who gets rid of all theirs cards wins.

Browsing the web, I soon found out that many american gamers had uploaded « Game of Thrones Bingo » cards, but I was convinced that drafting playing cards could make this much more interesting. If drafting cards before viewing again an old episode, memory can help. If drafting before watching a new one, it’s all about guessing what will happen next.

Since it was based on my souvenirs of The Crow, the name of my game was obvious – The Raven. I brought a prototype in Minneapolis, everyone had a good laugh, but no one seriously considered publishing it. In the end, the official Game of Thrones light card game was the excellent Hand of the King by my friend Bruno Cathala.

Since there are no pictures and no long quotes of the novels or the series in it, I don’t think anyone will object to its publication here, for free. Since the 8th and last season of Game of Thrones is coming soon, it’s probably the best and last opportunity to do it. You can play it while revising the orders seasons, then while watching the new one. All you need is to download the pdf, print it and cut the cards.

The Raven A game by Bruno Faidutti
2 to 8 players – 50 minutesFree download

I still consider Citadels to be at its best with four or five players, and I’ve never been really fond of the two players rules. Many players like them, so they must not be really bad, but they’re not really for me.

In 2016, after having finished working on the new edition of Citadels, I discovered Greedy Kingdoms, a small two player card game designed by Hayato Kisaragi and first published in 2009. I owned the game for quite long, but hadn’t looked at it before. Mechanically, Greedy Kingdoms has little in common with Citadels, but both games are based on character cards, are about building buildings (can you say this?) , and rely on the same psychological dilemmas. As a result, they feel somewhat similar. With a Japanese friend, I played Greedy Kingdoms a lot, and in then end I took it over to make my own version. I didn’t change much to the hero abilities, but I largely redesigned the other cards, buildings, citizens and magical items. There is a specific and relatively lazy pleasure in designing, one after another, cards to fit in an already existing system. I had the same fun working on Greedy Kingdoms that I had on Warehouse 51, or on revisiting older designs such as Castle or Fist of Dragonstones. This is so much easier and rewarding than creating a brand new system.

Greedy Kingdoms’ first edition, and Hayato Kisaragi on a RRR card.

We’ve never actually met, but it’s not the first time I work with Hayato Kisaragi, since he designed theJapanese mythos cards for my Battle of Gods / Mythos game, published in a Japanese game magician and in the french comics magazine Lanfeust – no English version yet, but there has been some talk about it. I haven’t played Hayato’s best know games, Grimoire and Lost Legacy, but I’ve read the rules. In many way, they seem to be a bit like my best designs, with lots of bluff, of fun card effects, and with more tactics than strategy.

Two japanese cards from my Mythos game

At Gen Con 2017, I talked a bit here and there about this game, which i decidedly enjoyed, and I finally decided to contact the first edition’s designer and publisher and see what could be made about my tweakings and ideas. They answered me that a new edition was already in the works, to be published by AEG, but that my developments were welcome. I wrote down all my ideas and sent the files to Hayato. He discussed a few ones, but in the end agreed on almost all my many minor changes. The idea was to keep the basic systems but to make the game clearer, more dynamic, and to tweak the balance to make it less unforgiving. I hope all those who enjoyed the first version of the game, of which there was only a hard to find bilingual Japanese / English edition, will appreciate the changes. With a big publisher and nice components, I also hope this will be an opportunity for this hidden gem to find new players.

Greedy Kingdom’s players are rival kings. Every round, one of them is the attacker and the other one the defender. The attacker plays face down three of his nine hero cards – King, Knight, Traveler, Painter, Baron, Cook, Witch, Bandit, Thief – , sending them to battle in order to win the resources – gold, food, honour and land – required to develop the kingdom. Of course, the rival king, the defender, tries to prevent this and also plays face down cards to block and neutralise three possible attackers. Only unblocked heroes can use their abilities. Hard earned resources are used ti promote heroes and give them extra abilities, to hire citizens, to build buildings (once more, this sounds strange) and even to buy useful but fragile magic items. Greedy Kingdoms is a development, tactical and bluffing game, and in the end something relatively involved and sophisticated for a light two player game. If you like Citadels, but like me don’t really enjoy it with two players, you will like Greedy Kindoms. And if you’re among the few persons who like two player Citadels, you might find it even better.

My great fear was that the US publisher would want to move the game’s action into their homemade pseudo-Renaissance universe, Tempest, which I find bland and unconvincing. I was ready to fight a bit on this, but luckily it wasn’t necessary. Working with AEG was really fast, efficient and enjoyable and I’m really happy they decided to keep the original Japanese graphics, and to order the graphics for the new cards to the same graphic team.

As a result, Greedy Kingdoms feels like an ironic mirror image of what I have described a few years ago in my essay about orientalism in boardgames. Greedy Kingdoms is indeed « occidentalist », the setting being western Middle-Ages as imagined and drawn in Japan. Seen from Europe, the result is cute and fun, with a mix of buildings and costumes from very different periods (and hairstyles from none at all), and even a courtesan who looks like a cheerleader. Dangerous fantasies of authenticity are on the rise again, and that’s why this kind of humorous mix is more necessary than ever. I’m all for cultural appropriation as long as it is done lightly, by everyone and in all directions, and the result is fun and colorful.

Once the game was pubmished in English, I started to talk about it to French publishers, trying to convince someone to make a French version. I was nevertheless a bit surprised whe, at the Cannes game fair, in February 2019, I learned that Gigamic was making the French version, that the rules and cards had already been translated, that the files had even been sent to the printer, but that no one had ever thought of informing me. Of course, the French tell that they thought the americans had informed me, and vice versa. Anyway, since both publishers are really nice people, and since the translation, which I just read, is good, there’s no harm done. The French version, L’Ambition des Rois, willhit the shelves in Spring 2019.

Like every year, I’l be at the Cannes Game Festival, February 22-24, to demo and promote my last games, to pitch new designs to publishers, and more generally to meet the small boardgaming world. My schedule is not entirely finalized, but I can already tell where you will be able to meet me.

Prototypes are ready.

On Friday, I’ll be from noon to 1pm at Lui-Même, the publisher of Dolorès. I know, it’s not really a new game, but I always enjoy showing it, and Philippe is an old friend. Later, from 2 to 3 pm, I’ll be at Matagot demoing Dragons.

On Saturday morning, I’ll be at the general assembly of the French game designers union. I’ll spend most of the afternoon, from 3 to 5 pm, at Sweet Games, demoing Menestrels (Minstrels), a card game designed with my friend Sandra Pietrini and gorgeously illustrated by David Cochard. Ménestrels won’t be on sale at the fair, but will be available – in French only so far – a few weeks later. Chances are the Sweet Games booth will be my base camp for most of the fair – unless I opt for Repos, or Matagot, or Space Cowboys. It will depend where there is beer and deep armchairs.

On Sunday, I’ll be from noon to 2 pm at Purple Brain / space Cowboys demoing Lost in the Woods, a cute game designed with my friend Anja Wrede and illustrated by Frédéric Pillot.

Nadine Seul

Nadine Seul, who was in charge of organizing the Cannes game fair, is retiring this year. Of course, I’ll be at her farewell drink. We’ll see next year if what has, in a few years, become a major international boardgame event, can go on without her.

One of the first ideas Anja and I developed when we started designing games together was a touch recognition game, Grabbit. Since I still have some hope of seeing it published some day, I won’t go into details about it.

Pushing further in the same way, we imagined a lighter game with fewer (and cheaper) components about a shepherd looking for his lost sheep. Anja drew about thirty different sheep with slightly different shapes and the shepherd had to find, feeling with only one hand in a cloth bag, the sheep that was represented on a card. It was cute, but the theme didn’t appeal to the publishers who saw our prototype. A few ones were even concerned that this could be mistaken for a religious game – the lost sheep, the lord is my shepherd and all that stuff. They liked the game system though.

I could not find a picture of Anja and I playing our prototype, so here’s one where we’re playing Captain Sonar, in opposite corners.

Our sheep were cute, and we didn’t want to abandon them. By chance, in Etourvy, Benoît Forget, after playing a game with us, suggested a new setting that could make the game fit in his Fairy Tales family game series, the Little Thumb story. We were skeptical at first, but he managed to convince us and soon the sheep became the trees in the dark forest where Little Thumb and his brothers were trying to find the way back to their parents’ cottage. We still have a few sets of light wood sheep, all different, may be we’ll make another game with them one of these days.

I really like the idea and the look of the Tales & Games series, and I wanted for a long time to get one of my designs in this line. Unfortunately, when I had told Benoit that I might have an idea for a Hare and Tortoise game, Gary Kim’s one was already in the pipe. It’s been published since, and is among my favorite ones. Anyway, I’m glad I finally made it with Anja and with Little Thumb lost in the woods.

The art for Lost in the Woods was made by the French popular children book illustrator Frédéric Pillot, mostly known here for the illustrated series Lulu Vroumette and Edmond le Chien. The board and cover were hand-painted. This gives them a charming old fashion style which fits the game perfectly.

Anja has already published dozens of children games. I don’t, mostly because I can’t really work on game designs I haven’t fun playing. Memory, which I often use as a minor element in my designs, is one of the few skills with which adults are not really better than children. Touch recognition is another one, and allows older and younger gamers to play together without having the adults « cheat to lose ». Therefore Lost in the Woods, like all the games in the Tales & Games series, is not only a kids game but really a game for all and everyone.

Lost in the WoodsA game by Anja Wrede & Bruno FaiduttiArt by Frédéric Pillot2 to 5 players – 15 minutesPublished by Purple Brain, 2019Boardgamegeek

It’s Christmas time, and, like every year, there is a sudden increase in newspaper articles and TV reports about boardgames, which is basically a good thing. Unfortunately, journalists always stubbornly use the same narrative : boardgames are « resisting » the video game invasion, or even are making a « comeback ». At least it’s what French journalists are saying, I suspect it might be a bit less systematic but probably still dominant in the US and the rest of the world. I often tried to make them deviate from this truism, usually with little success. I sometimes thought I had been clear and convincing, but regularly still found it in the final report or article. Sometimes, like in a recent article in the French magazine Le Point, the journalist finally understood that it was wrong and stupid to present boardgames and video games as rivals… but his board reintroduced this lazy idea in the article’s title, which bore little relations with the article’s content.

Opposing video games and board games makes as much sens as opposing movies and literature, or music and songs. Boardgames designers and publishers are not hostile to video games. They don’t see them the video game business as a rival, a competitor, but rather as a nice and successful cousin. Most of them are avid video game players, and many also work in the video game business, since there are many relations, and regular coming and goings, between the two worlds. Some designers regularly move from one to the other, like my friend Manuel Rozoy. Pixel games publishers very often have a try at cardboard ones, and I’m now working with Ankama. The very first drafts of many video games are often cardboard or paper and pen prototypes. Conversely, more and more boardgames borrow ideas and systems first imagined for video games. I might not be the best person to tell about it, since I almost never play video games, and my only attempt at designing one, Fearz!, went largely unnoticed. I am, however, an exception. The reason I’m not very interested in video games, and especially in the ones which flirt with virtual reality, is due to a general indifference with pictures, which also makes me more interested in books than in movies, and not to a reactionary rejection of technology and modernity.

« Good old board games resisting bad video games » is an absurd narrative. There has never been that many boardgames sold. Boardgames are not « resisting », they are developing more than ever. They are not coming back, since they have never receded and have never been that far. There might be a bubble, but that’s a completely different question.It’s the opposite. The recent success of boardgames is largely due to video games, and to a lesser extent role playing games and poker, which have finally made adult gaming something normal and socially acceptable. I was born in the early sixties, I play since the eighties, and I’ve witnessed the transition from a world in which gaming was a children thing, and adult gamers were seen as old kids refusing to take the world seriously and to live the reality, into a world in which gaming is a perfectly acceptable leisure activity, and sometimes even a rewarding and well appreciated one. We owe this, in a large part, to video games.Furthermore, role playing games and video games have also made relatively complex board and card games more acceptable. Strategic and demanding games such as Terraforming Mars or Scythe, may be even middle weight games such as Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride, would not have been designed and published, or at least would not have been very successful if video games had not first made gamers accustomed to some sophistication. The real novelty is that there are now scores of adult boardgamers, most of which also play video games, and an overwhelming choice of games for everyone. Oolder generations could only chose between scrabble, hearts, poker or bridge, most of which were even only acceptable in some limited social circles. Yes, I know, there was Diplomacy and Civilization, but these were exceptions, two games in fifty years for a niche and elitist marker; there are dozens of more complex games now published every year, and some of them are almost mainstream.

I’m still waiting for the day when magazines and TVs will change their narrative, and will tell the true story of how role playing games and video games have triggered the revival of boardgames, and that all these games are related, but not really in competition.

I’m starting to know the journalists who visit me to discuss the popularity of boardgames. They come with a positive bu relatively obsolete idea of boardgames, and I know what they want me to tell – that boardgames are a social, casual, interactive, reassuring family leisure, while video games are the exact opposite a solitary, violent, pathological nerve racking activity. Most of these journalists work for newspapers, for magazines or for TV channels. These medias resent being weakened by new online competitors, and tend to copy-paste this paradigm into other activities where it is not always relevant (OK, this might be less true in the US, I’m writing mostly about French journalists)It’s true that video games are often played solitary, in front of one’s screen and with a cup of coffee, but there can sometimes be more than one player in front of a screen. Also, while online network gaming might be less social than multiplayer gaming around a table, it’s still far more social than good old book reading.It’s true that boardgames are mostly played with friends, around a table, with beer or wine, but there are more and more solitary boardgames (in which I’m not really interested). Furthermore, playing boardgames is often a way to have some good time with people with whom one doesn’t really want to discuss personal or political matters.In short, these are indeed different ways of gaming, but it makes no sense to systematically oppose « social » boardgames and asocial video games. Players know this, as do publishers who have ordered and read market surveys which regularly show that video gamers and board gamers are mostly the same persons.

Cardboard boardgames can nevertheless, like paper books, feel reassuring, because we understand how their crude technology works. This might be the reason why gamers can enjoy playing analog versions of games for which computers are obviously a more efficient media, be they monster heavy stuff like Gloomhaven or the 7th Continent or deduction games like Sherlock Holmes Private Detective. This might also explain why, except for a few very specific objects such as Unlock, hybrid games have not so far been very successful. Gamers withdrawing for a while into the cardboard world probably don’t want to be sent back at once to the computer one, but this doesn’t mean they have become luddites wanting to break the machines. They just want some rest, and will sit with renewed pleasure in front of their computer the next day.

At the last Essen game fair, in october, I was surprised to hear many people express their anger at or distrust of Tom Vasel, and thought this was unfair. Tom is certainly the most popular and influent game reviewer, the one whose video reviews, which have replaced his old written ones, get the most views and comments on the Boardgamegeek, on Facebook and on his own website, the Dice Tower, even though the latter is a bit hard to navigate. This is due to their clear structure, a short but clear explanation of the rules followed by a sound and wel-argued subjective opinion, all this in about fifteen minutes, but also to his clear expression and his obvious pitchman talent. I usually prefer to read written reviews, but when I want a short description and opinion on a recent game, I often watch Tom Vasel’s review, and when there’s none a review by one of his Dice Tower acolytes, Zee Garcia and Sam Healey.

I’ve heard mostly two criticisms of Tom and, to a lesser extent, Zee and Sam. Designers and publishers blame them for being partial against their games, or even for bad faith, while gamers rebuke them for not sharing their tastes and opinions and therefore being « subjective ».Of course, an objective review is an oxymoron, since the only point of a review is to express as clearly as possible the subjective opinion of its author. An « objective review », if there’s something like this, would be pointless – just a soulless and boring description or a plain paraphrase of the game’s rules. Tom and his friends know this. They first give a rough an d pedagogical description of a game, and then give their opinion with wit and conviction.

Of course, a game designer is always a bit depited and frustrated when an influential critic dislikes his last design, and it happened to me many times. It is, however, perfectly legit, and one cannot ask a reviewer to play fifteen one’s game fifteen times to make sure one doesn’t like it. Furthermore, if there is a reviewer I don’t suspect of bad faith, it’s Tom Vasel. I think I’ve well understood his tastes in games, which are not dissimilar with mine. He usually likes my games and, most of all, I can predict with a quasi-certainty which games he will like or dislike. This means his verdicts are indeed only based on his personal opinion and not on some interest or calculation. I could have some doubts if his judgements were inconsistent or loosely argued, but they are the opposite, consistent, clearly argued and based on an impressive knowledge of modern gaming. Of course, one can disagree with him, but that’s rarely my case – at least about games. For the rest, we are ideologically at odds, since I hate all religions and am extremely wary of so-called family values, but we agree, at least, on one thing – we should not set our convictions aside when discussing games.

Sam, Tom & Zee cards from Nothing Personal

This brings me to another fun topic. Tom is probably the best known individual in the boardgaming world, the one everybody recognizes at game fairs. He is famous as a reviewer, since almost no one knows he also designed two really good games, Nothing Personal and Vicious Fishes. One of the reasons why the were largely unnoticed is that, as a game reviewer, e didn’t dare to promote them. His acolytes Sam and Zee are also minor celebrities, as well as some of the boardgamegeek team, especially Eric Martin, and a few other reviewers such as Dan King aka The Gameboygeek, or in a different style Matt & Quinns of Shut-up and Sit Down. They are, I think, more often recognized at game fairs than most game designers. If Tom is the most famous, it’s because of his gift of gab, because he visibly enjoys being a minor celebrity, and because of his stature, his ties and his hats. Comparatively, most game designers can visit game fairs relatively incognito. This is true for those who, like me, enjoys to be from time to time at the center of attention, and even more for those who, like Antoine Bauza, carefully avoid it.

The Boadgamegeek team after Essen 2018

The development of the internet has caused a « cultural dislocation ». One of its effects is the appearance of « minor celebrities » who achieve a near star status in a relatively small circle. The small boardgaming world is one of these circles, but it’s interesting to notice that its small stars are more often game reviewers than game designer or artists. There could be psychological reasons for this. Boardgame designers are often solitary characters – I know it’s surprising since boardgames are a social activity, but believe me, once you know a lot of them, it’s an evidence – while reviewers are probably more extrovert people, eager to speak and to be listened to, and enjoying being in the spotlights. There are also technical explanations, mostly the fact that the reviewer’s face can be seen on every video, but not the designer’s one. My face is moderately known because I’m very active on facebook and on my website, and because I’m not good at keeping it quiet. Eric Lang’s one is also well known for the same reasons, and may be also because there are not that many black people in the boadgaming world. But who can spot in a game fair other important designers such as Vlaada Chvatil, Antoine Bauza, Jamey Stiegmaier or Wolfgang Warsch. I don’t have the slightest idea what the last one looks like. I don’t know if this is a good or a bad thing.

And now a few videos featuring my games :

My 10 best games according to Tom Vasel, as of January 2018 :

My new games at Gen Con 2017, interview with Eric Martin of the BGG :

Tom Vasel reviews Dragons’ Gold:

Shut Up and Sit Down reviews Secrets :

The GameBoyGeek reviews Waka Tanka :

OK, there are one or two games of mine Tom didn’t enjoy – here he discusses letters of Marque:

It has now become very easy to stay informed of the new games published, and even to read or watch online detailed reviews by talented and well informed reviewers, on the Boardgamegeek or on websites like The Dice Tower. As a result, printed game magazines have nearly disappeared ore have become extremely confidential stuff. The only one I still subscribe to, Spielbox, is also one of the oldest ones and now even has an English language edition. The last issue starts with a detailed review of Lift Off, by Jeroen Vandersteen, which seems to be an interesting and a relatively heavy management game about the space race in the sixties. The review is rather positive, and made me want to play the game, but it would have been more convincing if it did not start with a completely wrong statement about the « pick and pass » drafting system used in games like Sushi Go or 7 Wonders. While French gamers now use the English word « draft » specifically for this type of draft, I’ve seen it used in English for games in which card are drafted from a central tableau, or a « river », or in a few other ways. Since there seems to be no specific term in English for games in which cards are drafted from hands passed from player to player around the table, I will use alternately “pick and pass” draft and “circular draft”.

Anyway, here’s Christian Klein’s rant against this kind of draft:
Is there a worse mechanism? You start with n cards in your hand; first you pass n-1 cards to the left, then n-2 of the cards you got from your right neighbor plus the cards in your hand, and so on until n-x equals zero. This approach doesn’t make the distribution of cards any less random or unfair than simply shuffling and distributing them, but it gives you the deceptive impression that you have a certain influence over your luck. However, it’s a waste of time, which is annoying given that the pace is given by the slowest player.

OK, the very last point is right, the pace of the whole draft is indeed given by the slowest player, but everything else in this paragraph is factually wrong. The maths are a bit complex and I could not formalize the whole problem, but it’s easy to prove that circular drafting makes players’ hands of cards better balanced, if only because extremely good and bad hands – the same player getting all best or all worst cards – become impossible, and therefore average hands much more likely.Post draft hands are not only better balanced, they are also far less random. Indeed, games using this kind of card drafting do not only have good and bad cards, they have different types of cards which can be used to create synergies. Circular drafting is not a convoluted way to deal random hands, it’s a fascinating game system in itself. There are even a few games, like Fairy Tale or 7 Wonders, where drafting is almost the whole game. Post draft hands are not random because they are the result of tactical choices, each player opting for a military, scientific or building strategy. If 7 Wonders were a totally random game, if circular drafting were just a waste of time, I bet some of the million people playing it would have noticed it.

The traditional children card game Spoons is probably the ancestor of al circular drafting games, even when players only pass one card every round. It needs as many series of four cards (7,8,9,10s) as players. Each player is dealt four cards and players simultaneously pass one card to their left neighbor until someone has four identical cards and grabs a spoon. In the nineties, In the nineties, our gaming nights often ended with Zuma, which was a kind of glorified Spoons with totems in different colors replacing spoons, and a few special cards. One card circular drafting is still occasionally used in modern card games, for example in the subtle and disconcerting 12 Days of Christmas, by James Ernest and Mike Selinker.

The pick and pass circular draft, in which each player only keeps one or more card every round and passes all other ones, first appeared as a zany poker variant, Anaconda, and then became a popular deck building system in Magic the Gathering tournaments. The first modern game entirely based on this I ever played was probably Satoshi Nakamura’s Fairy Tale, a clever but a bit convoluted card game published in 2004. I remember enjoying it and thinking there will soon be more games of its kind, and probably lighter ones – I was right. Other pure and light circular drafting card games are Curt Covert’s Nevermore, Nicolas Poncin’s Medieval Academy, Donald Vacarino’s Greed, Kane Klenko’s Cosmic Factory or Florian Fay’s Mesozoic, these two last games feeling a bit similar with their real time element.

The verb “to draft” originally means to recruit soldiers, and by extension to recruit athletes in a team. Surprisingly, there are not that many games in which players recruit a team of characters through pick and pass. In Richard Garfield’s Treasure Hunter, cards are adventurers exploring unknown lands, in Orc-lympics, by Trevor Benjamin and David Thompson, they are fantasy athletes. I also have a prototype about recruiting fantasy athletes, and another one about recruiting fantasy musicians into a rock band.

There is another natural theme suggested by circular draft and cards going around the table – sushi carousels. Two designers Takahiro Amioka and Phil Walker Harding had this idea, resulting in two fun and simple drafting games, Sushi Draft and Sushi Go, the latter supporting up to 8 players in its party edition. Why not a game about recovering one’s at the airport, or one’s kids getting off the merry-go-round.

Circular draft generates, through a very easy rule, deep and recurring tactical choices. It creates tension not through aggressive interaction but through the expectation for new cards and the frustration of not being able to keep all of them – a well balanced drafting game has only good cards, but very different ones. Pick and pass drafting is a great way to create rich and subtle tactical games based on a rule explained in two minutes.

Bigger boxes doesn’t always mean much heavier games. Best seller is Antoine Bauza’s 7 Wonders and its many expansions. In most simple light drafting games, players first build their hand and then play their cards, either all at once or one after the other. In 7 Wonders, like in Tides of Time, a cute two player circular drafting game by Kristian Curla, drafted cards are immediately revealed, which creates more possibilities fir interaction. Despite this, I’m not a fan of 7 Wonders, which has a convoluted scoring system and takes far too much table place. Last year, there was also much talk of Masato Uesugi’s Paper Tales, which looks gorgeous but doesn’t feel really innovative (BTW, that’s the third or fourth Japanese designer in this article, there might be some reason), and not enough talk, I think, of Jonathan Ying’s really fun Bargain Quest.

Anyway, my two favorite big box drafting games are probably the very elegant Treasure Hunter and the cute and fun Bunny Kingdom, both designed by Richard Garfield – which makes very curious of Richard’s next upcoming drafting game, Carnival of Monsters. Antoine Bauza and the Kaedama team also have a new drafting game in the pipe, Draftosaurus. There are also several games I didn’t play yet, like Vangelis Bagiartakis’ Among the Stars, Xavier Georges’s Ginkgopolis, Mathew O’Malley & Ben Rossett’s Between Two Cities (and its sequel Between Two Castles of Mad King Ludwig), Mike Elliott’s Lost Legends. I don’t think so many talented designers could have been interested in designing such games, and so many players in playing them, if it were just illusion and waste of time.

Circular drafting can also be used in a very different way, which is the main target of the Spielbox reviewer’s rant, building the players’ hands of cards before a much heavier boardgame begins, which can be a game of development, war, management or anything. Pick and pass draft can indeed look like a convoluted substitute for random card dealing, but it is much more than that in Jim Pinto’s Dominare, in Régis Bonnessée’s Seasons, in Eric Lang’s Blood Rage, in Serge Mascadar’s Seeders of Sereis, in Christian Martinez’s Inis and probably in many other big box games published these 10 last years – there are too many, I can’t play everything. I’ve never played Dominare because the board and cards are too ugly, but Ghislain Masson keeps repeating it’s a great game and will probably have me play it one of these days. After all, I play and enjoy the ugly Terraforming Mars.

Initial circular drafting is a fun and efficient way to have players build a strategy before the game really begins and, unlike what Christian Klein writes, generates consistent, balanced and interesting hand of cards, something a random card dealing rarely does. It’s like a fast paced deck building made once and for all before the action really starts. The only issue I have with this mechanism is that it requires a good knowledge and understanding of the game from its very beginning, and therefore gives a strong advantage to players who already have some experience of it. This is a real problem, for example, in Seasons, and is why I don’t like this game that much. The rules for Terraforming Mars judiciously suggest a random dealing for the first game, and a circular draft only with experienced players who know the cards well enough to build combos and synergies. May be it doesn’t work that well in Lift Off, I don’t know, I wait for a French or English language version to play it, but it really adds interest to all the other games I’ve named in this article.

You might be surprised to see me stand up for pick and pass drafting when I’ve not published a single game using this mechanism. I’ve sometimes seen Citadels and its sequel Lost Temple described as drafting games, but this is a bit far fetched. There is indeed a pick and pass sequence at the beginning of every round, but there’s already one set of cards passed from player to player, and choosing a single card is not the same as building a hand. Small Detectives, co-designed with Charles Chevalier, also feels a bit like a « draft and play » game à la 7 Wonders, but it’s exactly the reverse. The cards passed are not the ones one doesn’t want, but the ones one plays, giving the next player the opportunity to play them later. It’s a fun mechanism, and I’m surprised it has not been used in other games that I know of, but it’s not really drafting.

I’ve no real circular draft game published so far, but it’s not for lack of trying. Two of the prototypes I’ve submitted to publishers these last years are fun party games based on drafting. One is about writing movie scenarios, the other one is a zany game which must be played while watching an episode of Game of Thrones. I’ll probably post the latter for free on my website before the last saison airs. I’m also working on three mid-weight boardgames in which players draft their hand around the table before the game really starts – one is scheduled to be published in 2019 or 2020, and I will probably have the two other ones with me next time I tour publishers.

I finally managed to finalize the paperwork to be entitled to the French writers and authors social security system. Though I made sure I always paid my premiums, I didn’t bother with getting any benefits so far because I already get them as a teacher.
Anyway, I can now more comfortably think of quitting teaching. It’s a terribly exhausting job, but it gave me so far a feeling of social usefulness thatI don’t really get when I have fun designing games. It also gave me opportunities to meet really varied people, something which rarely happens in the board gaming world. Sure, I travel and meet gamers, game publishers and game designers all around the world, but these people are all more or less alike, and more or less like me; they have the same hobbies, the same interests, the same cultural references. Teachers and students are a much more eclectic bunch .
The real point, however, is that I really enjoy teaching – as long as what I teach makes some sense, has some meaning to me and some usefulness for my students. I’m not sure this can still be the case with the new official economics and sociology curriculums (or should I write curricula?) which I’m supposed to teach next year. These curriculums are pedagogically catastrophic and scientifically dishonest.

They are pedagogically catastrophic because they teach a completely mathematical and dehumanized vision of economics and social science. They start from abstract (and questionable) models and not from the social realities which students more or less know. We are supposed to study the shapes of marginal cost curves (with students who lack the necessary maths) before even discussing unemployment, income inequality or state intervention. This is placing the cart before the horse, as if math teachers refused to use the four arithmetic operations until they have studied number theory in depth. And please don’t tell me I despise models, I’m a boardgames designer, I design models every day, I know what they are useful for but also why we should be wary of them.

Good pedagogy starts from reality and acknowledges its complexity. One can discuss the way subjects are regrouped in French schools – economics with sociology, history with geography, literature with French language – and I would probably have preferred other pairings. Anyway, the main point of the economics / sociology pairing was to study social realities, such as employment, consumption or ecological issues, from different and distanced points of view. We won’t be able to do this any more, since we will have to study abstract models in economics, and harmless risk-free topics in sociology. Everything is made to forbid any interdisciplinary view which could suggest that we live in a complex society and that students are allowed to think by themselves.

These curriculums are scientifically dishonest because they Ignore the scientific debate and the plurality of analysis. Fr example, unemployment is now only studied in its relation with qualification. I’ve been teaching for 35 years now, and I’ve learned it’s always a mistake to take students for fools – some individuals might be fools, but they’re never as a group. They know quite well it’s more complex, and taking them for fools won’t convince them to study harder at school in order to get a well paid job.
Similarly, sociology is becoming purely individualistic, any approach in terms of social groups having been carefully removed from the curriculum. Once more, we are really taking students for fools if we think this will convince them there are no more social classesin our wonderful modern world.

I could go on for pages. This trend was already present in the last version of the programs, which were written in 2012. Luckily, teachers have managed to circumvent some of the issues in order to bring back meaning and interest to their lectures. This will become much harder with the 2019 curiculum, especially when the new baccalaureat schedule also reduces pedagogical freedom.

I am therefore starting to wonder if I should quit a job which will lost most of its meaning, and all this for extremely petty reasons. This disaster is not even the result of a capitalist or libertarian conspiracy to inculcate a bright « modern » vision of economics to our children. It’s just the result of a random convergence between a few disconnected industry bosses who honestly think we are teaching class struggle, a few academic dons who only think of pushing their own fields of study, and a tiny teachers clique whose guru honestly think he is still a liberal. I bet they will all recognize themselves if they happen to read this text. Unfortunately, it seems this unlikely alliance is enough to dismantle the social science teaching in French high schools.